Sunday, September 11, 2011

It's time for an alternate viewpoint on this. 9/11 happened ten years ago. And what too few people seem to realise is that the terrorists have won.

Michael Moore was fucking right. Okay, yeah, he sounded preachy as hell about it, and everyone got a big laugh out of it ha ha look at the sanctimonious liberal okay time for some fat jokes FUCK YOU. He was right and he was lambasted for being right, in a time when the people who needed an excuse - and found that 9/11 fit the bill nicely - really wanted as few people as possible to catch on to what the fuck they were doing. Moore had it spot-on when Iraq was first invaded, sparking the second of two wars that have each dwarfed 9/11 on their own in terms of civilian casualties, in Dude, Where's My Country: 'Hey, let's dismantle our way of life so the terrorists can't blow it up!'

What was the biggest meme the bastards spread about Al Qaeda? 'They hate us for our freedoms!' What fucking freedoms? There aren't any left. America has become a place where mosques are vandalised just for not being Christian places of worship and innocent people are attacked - potentially fatally - for being Muslim, thanks to the shaved-monkey touchiness with which the US Christian establishment has succeeded in saturating the nation's congregation.

Islam has become the new Communism, the latest bogeyman, and no one with a vested interest has lost any time in turning anyone swarthy-looking into a target of suspicion and paranoia. The very word 'Islamofascist' was coined as a club for bludgeoning the American populace about the head until the nation's behaviour, seen from the rest of the world's viewpoint, closer resembles that of a chicken than a human being - convinced the world is coming to an end one minute, busily consuming as much as it can the next, and eagerly closing the barn door to shut itself in rather than deal with the rest of the world in a rational manner - sacrificing what used to be seen as essential human liberty for the mere illusion of greater safety.

And it's going to keep getting worse. Brian Kane has put a great phrase to it:

It’s time to give it over to history once and for all. There’s no question that the aftermath has long since overshadowed the tragedy itself. It is the aftermath that has reshaped the world in its twisted and destructive grasp. We’ve long ago stopped even pretending to be interested in the lives lost and lives disrupted. The power elite found every possible avenue of exploitation — political, economic, social — and have ruined anything and everything in their efforts to wring every last ounce of worth from them. And with the reality wiped away by the iconography and ideology, we can safely let it go. The whirlwind it created is now permanently self-sustaining without it.

It should be let go. It won't.

It will be kept going, the fear will be kept in the background of every news report possible (as well as almost every Fox News broadcast, pretending as they do to be an actual news service), the wars will be carried on until there's nothing further to be squeezed from the nation, and then the serfs will be given something else to be worried about. More than anything else for the past thirty years, 9/11 has been a supremely fortunate windfall for those who envision America as an aristocracy, who look at the country's middle class the way locusts look at fields of wheat, who can and will do anything possible to get away with taxing the living fuck out of anyone but the rich. Bush and the GOP senate were able to strong-arm a lot of their deregulation fantasies through, with almost no resistance, and loot the treasury in an orgy of war profiteering. Without 9/11 it would have taken another decade to achieve all this.

Meanwhile, the fundamentalists of both Islam and Christianity get what they want - a polarised, us-versus-them worldview spoonfed to every believer they can reach, each faith's leaders painting the other as controlled by , if not embodying, supernatural forces of evil. And everyone else, from the sane believers to the tired, angry idealist nonbelievers, gets a little bit more fucking sick of this shit.